Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic. By regarding our most cultured human accomplishments as the (...) result of the excessive, nonfunctional forces of sexual attraction and seduction, Grosz encourages us to see art as a kind of bodily enhancement or mode of sensation enabling living bodies to experience and transform the universe. Art can be understood as a way for bodies to augment themselves and their capacity for perception and affection-a way to grow and evolve through sensation. Through this framework, which knits together the theories of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jakob von Uexküll, we are able to grasp art's deep animal lineage. Grosz argues that art is not tied to the predictable and known but to new futures not contained in the present. Its animal affiliations ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of new worlds and new forms of living. According to Grosz, art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or nature, in order to bring about change. (shrink)

Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern. In _Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing_, Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in (...) which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, Bogost’s alien phenomenology takes for granted that _all_ beings interact with and perceive one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and becomes accessible only through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor. Providing a new approach for understanding the experience of things _as_ things, Bogost also calls on philosophers to rethink their craft. Drawing on his own background as a videogame designer, Bogost encourages professional thinkers to become makers as well, engineers who construct things as much as they think and write about them. (shrink)

Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

A Shock to Thought brings together essays that explore Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of expression in a number of contemporary contexts. It will be of interest to all those in philosophy, cultural studies and art theory. The volume also contains an interview with Guattari which clearly restates the 'aesthetic paradigm' that organizes both his and Deleuze's work.

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy cuts to the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and of today's science wars.At the start of the 21st Century, ...

Examines the author's idea of object-oriented philosophy, wherein things, and how they interact with one another, are the center of philosophical interest.

Betti Marenko explores the changing status of the technodigital object - and the mobile intensities that characterize the current objectscape - to account for objects’ evolving intelligence. She looks at how hand-held mobile devices, are reshaping the nexus object-subject into temporal discontinuities of human and non-human assemblages. Her talk argues that the shift from object to event delineated by Gilles Deleuze – where space becomes time, form becomes formation, and moulding becomes modulation - needs to be taken on board by (...) design practices and discourses as constitutive of a material-driven epochal shift. A morphogenetic perspective on matter prompts design to question some of its assumptions around how objects actually come to exist, and in broader terms, design’s own relationship with materiality. She argues for a shift in design’s theoretical location, from design as a problem solving activity - a task-oriented, performance-measured, linear exercise, that reduces uncertainty, a conventional view of design as a technology of affective capture enforcing and reproducing market ideologies - to design as a problem finding enterprise – that is, an enterprise that veers towards problematizing and complexifying the existent. Within this morphogenetic framework design should come unhinged from its teleological fixation with form and function, and embrace instead an intuition-based apprehension rooted in ‘following matter’, vagueness and variation. This perspective is deployed to examine the silicon-based materiality of digital devices and their key component, the microchip. Silicon is examined in reference to both Deleuze’s prophetic ‘revenge of the silicon’ and also by looking at how a new breed of microchips that ‘follow’ neural activity are bypassing the distinction between carbon and silicon-based life, animate and inanimate matter, and articulating new forms of intelligence. The convergence of silicon and carbon, via Deleuze’s concept of nonorganic life, allows Marenko to read the technodigital object as the site of diverse material intelligences unfolding morphogenetically, beyond the narrow paradigms of cyborgness on the one hand and dematerialization on the other. (shrink)

This article argues that our apprehension of the world is increasingly colored by animistic connotations. Traces of animism – the idea that objects and other nonhuman entities possess a soul, life force, and qualities of personhood – are evident in the way we talk to our computers, cars, and smartphones, and in our expectations that they will reply more or less instantaneously. As the Internet of Things becomes more mainstream, the fact that our phone communicates with our thermostat, car, washing (...) machine, or bathroom scale is no longer a future scenario; it is increasingly a shared reality. Our way of experiencing everyday objects is changing to accommodate their shifting nature, purpose, and agency. (shrink)